At Fon we are very, very happy to announce that we have teamed up with Neuf Cegetel, a gigantic French ISP with over 1.2 million true broadband customers. After careful study of the French market and talking to different players there Fon chose to team up with Neuf Cegetel for one simple reason. They are a marketing powerhouse. They have a great broadband product and they sell the hell out of it! Now what´s revolutionary about this? That in France, as opposed to the United States for example broadband services come with WiFi and they come with a box that is owned by the operator in which the operator can include new features. So Neuf can increase the bandwidth to customers and can flash the Fon software centrally to them so they all become Neuf/Fon hotspots and enjoy free WiFi roaming. Now if you can choose an ISP in which you pay for bandwidth at home and get bandwidth at home or you can choose Neuf and you pay for bandwidth at home and you roam the world for free which ISP will you choose? And thanks to Neuf being so advanced, Fon France does not need to have people flash their own routers or buy the Fon routers, Neuf simply sends the firmware overnight to the Neuf boxes and these boxes start operating as hotspots so all the Neuf customers can then roam France for free. Soon Neuf will offer wifi phones for example and Neuf customers will be able to call for free in most urban centers of France where there´s Neuf/Fon signal. Moreover as Fon is Open Source, Fon and Neuf invite all the creative French companies to put their contents in WiFi offerings, WiFi radios, WiFi TV stations are but a few of the ideas. Others include WiFi games, and auto connect for Nintendo DS, Playstations, and other cool WiFi devices. If you have any ideas for original WiFi offerings do write to me over this blog.

Very good new. I’ll be connected to Neuf Cegetel by the 30th of april. I’ve receive the broadbandbox and wi-fi thing. So I will not have to add a Fon box? So far, Neuf has not communicated on this, but I’ll pester them about it.

Just wondering what is the principal reason for not having chosen Free ? If I remember well Free was the first to put the “box” on the market and can also flash the software on it centrally. I also think that Free has a bigger market share then Neuf/Cegetel.

So why not Free ? Do you see them as Fon’s local competitor ? Thanks. Viktor

Well, Neuf will propose to all of its clients to become Foneros and we have to see how many accept. In any case with 100,000 Fon points in France we will have very good coverage. The largest wifi networks in France now only have around 4000 hotspots.